If you are using Webdeploy you might wish to alter the connection string the for the LocalSQLServer that is used by the ASP.NET provider for web part personalisation. The default is to use ASPNETDB.mdf in the APP_Data folder, but in a production system you could well want to use a ‘real’ SQL server. If you look in your …

Colin Dembovsky’s excellent post ‘WebDeploy and Release Management – The Proper Way’ explains how to pass parameters from Release Management into MSDeploy to update Web.config files. On the system I am working on I also need to do some further web.config translation, basically the WCF section is different on a Lab or …

I have been using Release Management to update some of our internal deployment processes. This has included changing the way we roll out MSDeploy packages; I am following Colin Dembovsky’s excellent post of the subject. I hit an interesting issue today. One of the configuration variable parameters I was passing into a …

I have been running Windows Phone 8.1 Update for a couple of weeks now and have to say I like. I have not suffered the poor battery life others seem to have suffered. Maybe this is an feature of the Nokia 820 no needing as many firmware updates from Nokia (which aren't available yet) note having such power hungry …

A significant blocker for some of my customers moving to Visual Studio 2013 (and 2012 previously) has been the removal of Visual Studio Setup Projects; my experience has been confirmed by UserVoice. Well Microsoft have addressed this pain point by releasing a Visual Studio Extension to re-add this Visual Studio 2010 …

My Nokia 820 phone is now updated to 8.1 with the developer preview. The actual upgrade was straight forward, the only issue was that the Store was down last night so updating apps could not be done until this morning. This was made more of an issue by the fact I had had to remove all my Nokia Maps and the iPodcast …

The 2013 editions of existing TFS books are now available Also well worth a look is ‘Team Foundation Server 2013 Customization’ by Gordon Beeming. A great look at all the extension points in TFS A longer list of books can be found in my reading list

I have had a Surface 2 for about six months. It is great for watching videos on the train, or a bit of browsing, but don’t like it for note taking in meetings. This is a shame, as this is what I got it for; a light device with good battery life to take to meetings. What I needed was something I could hand write on in …

With Visual Studio 2012 there were changes in the way Web Publishing worked; the key fact being that the configuration was moved from the .csproj to a .pubxml in the properties folder. This allows them to be more easily managed under source control by a team. This does have some knock on effects though, especially when …

Updated 20 Oct 2014 – With notes on using an Action for cross domain authentication In my previous post I described how to get a network isolated environment up and running with Release Management, it is all to do with shadow accounts. Well getting it running is one thing, having a useful release process is another. …